thanks pop!

I needed a new digital camera some kinda bad. I'm supposed to be shooting the festival in September, and my nearly-decade-old Kodak EasyShare is tottering along. Doing it all on film crossed my mind but would be prohibitively expensive. Sent dad a note asking if he could pick one up cheap over there in Thailand and bring it when he visits in August. He said they're more expensive there, weirdly. Then he asked what I needed in one. Then I shot for the stars and said I wanted, basically, a Nikon D40. Now, I of course knew that this was not going to happen. But this is how you ask for (expensive) things from my dad. You ask for the golden plate, and bargain down to the silver goblet.

On it's way is a brand new Cannon PowerShot A720.

WEll, one of these days I'll have a digital SLR.

And I messed around some more with the Minolta Maxxus (maxxum?) yesterday. Took it out to Blystock and finished the roll that was in it. Then spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to rewind the thing to get the film out. I don't have a manual for this camera and the one I found online is, like, translated straight from Malaysian which makes for fun reading like "press the buttons being on the top in blue". Ok got the film out. Another half hour trying to figure out how to wind the new roll in. Embarrassing, I can rewind unload and load a manual camera in just a couple of minutes and now I look like a total idiot of course scratching my head at this automatic thing. Successfully shot through another roll getting used to the autofocus and hoping the shutter speed was right- I see no way to set it so back to the online manual I will go.

The camera has a lot of buttons that work together or separately, it appears. I just don't know how yet.

Using film again after a digital for so long took getting used to. There could be no deleting as I went. Every frame was precious again. There is maybe one decent picture on the roll I shot yesterday, which is ok. That ratio will get better as I learn the camera. I do intend to do some of the festival with film, I just was not wanting to do ALL of it.